Thousands of years ago we communicated with images, drawings, and symbols. Before we had an alphabet we drew on walls to communicate with others in our community. Some of the oldest cave paintings were over 10,000 years old and they still exist. Now, we communicate on different walls (Facebook, Pinterest boards, Twitter streams, Instagram, etc.), but in similar ways with symbols (emojis, textspeak) and images. These walls and the cave walls our ancestors drew on are shared worldwide through bytes. Our learners messages spread and they have impact and a worldwide audience. It’s up to teachers to help our students realize their byte-sized potential to make a meaningful impact. It’s up to teachers to guide students in choosing to uplift, teach, inform, challenge, and care for others with their messages versus break down others. Additionally, our students need guidance in realizing their self worth and seeing themselves as individuals in a digital world. They need to practice choosing what they feel is right as individuals versus going along with their peers for instant approval. These are ideas I shared in my recent keynote for ICEIndiana, Byte-sized Potential and Learning with the 8 C’s (Compassion, Communication, Creativity, Courage, Critical Thinking, Curiosity, Collaboration, and Citizenship). Below are the slides (free to download), resources, and ideas to help you be a guide to your learners as they navigate a vast digital world where their choices make such an enormous impact. Also, check out the incredible sketchnote of my keynote by Matt Miller (@JMattMiller).

Resources

Citizenship- I believe the way to facilitate the 7 C’s begins with our students realizing what their duties, roles, and responsibilities are as citizenships in their digital world.
Get students to create avatars and introduce themselves. Younger kids will especially benefit from creating avatars. Find a list of avatar creation tools and ideas here!
Selfies represent how our students see themselves. Get them to go on selfie adventures, develop their self esteem and identity, and participate in active learning with these activities and resources. This is the video I showed, Around the World in 360 3 Year Selfie Adventure.
Check out this class of student selfie adventures in Argentina!

Courage/Compassion- It takes courage for our students to stand up to cyberbullying and speak up.
Introduce them to role models their age like Kid President.
Send them on learning missions and get them to create digital badges to give to their peers to recognize bravery, kindness and compassion.
Our students become activists with hashtags. Get them to invent their own hashtags to inspire positive action. Find resources here.

Communication- Students now translate and contribute to an international language with textspeak and emojis. Find more info and activities with emojis here.

Creativity- Don’t grade all your assignments. Instead, give students opportunities to participate in free flow brainstorming and exploring. Students need time to play. Find ideas for play here and listen to these inspiring TedTalks on creativity.

Critical Thinking- Critical thinking is a journey. Critical thinking is not a correct answer, but the journey to find solutions. Some of the greatest inventions and innovations were discovered by mistakes, accidents, and failed experiments. Students need to be able to experiment without fear of receiving bad grades. Here are resources for brainstorming, digital research, and digital research apps.

Many free curation and aggregation tools and apps, like Educlipper, Pinterest, and Livebinders, help students to quickly and easily create their portfolios and keep them throughout their learning journey.